Malmström, Mikael

Abstract [en]

This report investigates the technical and economic viability of introducing a Near Field Communication (NFC) client system in a gym environment. The system aims to aid the customers with logging their workout, retrieving information regarding exercises as well as enhancing the attendance control for both staff and customers. To identify what information to be presented, the most important quality factors and what functionalities are most desired, an exploratory case study was conducted. The study showed that there is a discrepancy between the desire to log ones workout and actually doing it. Most people want to keep track of how they workout, but despite the wide variety of workout applications on the market, they choose not to use them. The main concern expressed was that the logging needs to be fast and easy, indicating that the existing apps do not fulfill the ease of use desired. The system presented in this report is coupled to the gym where NFC tags pair an exercise to its corresponding logger and information in the application. The ability for the gym to track its customers’ workout habits is a rare feature that provides several economic benefits such as targeted advertisement, better maintenance control and new customer services analyzing their workout. For the system to be effective the customers need to use the system and log their workout, therefore it needs to be supported by the major mobile platforms. To accommodate this a hybrid platform approach using PhoneGap was used. This approach allows for development in one language that translates into native embedded web applications. At the time of writing Apple’s latest models do include the hardware for NFC communication. However, it is not possible to develop a custom NFC application for iPhone yet. By adopting the hybrid approach there is no need to create a whole new app when they do release the rights to do so. In conclusion, the technical viability of the NFC based system comes with the tradeoffs of dealing with the lack of standards of a new technology and being early on the market with a new feature. This calls for some custom solutions, since each platform adopts their own way of NFC implementation, but is manageable. The economic aspects are tied to the use of the system where the ease of use is the key factor for the customers. The end user tests indicate that NFC provides that small advantage over traditional workout applications needed to make logging attractive.